Bloody hell I've just spent today reading the Friday threads and finally caught up. @Boiledbeetle happy to report due to this I am still in my pyjamas. Also I sincerely love you for the Austin pastiche.
Thoughts in not particular order...
Pratchett. Huge fan. I think if he'd lived and maintained his faculties he'd have follwed the same path as many of us, initially #BeKind tolerance "of course we should treat them like women if that helps them fit in, it's not like they're going to be doing anything unreasonable like getting naked with full tackle in ladies changing rooms or sitting on women's commitees or competing in women's sports" to "holy shit they actually are getting naked with full tackle in ladies changing rooms and sitting on women's commitees and competing in women's sports!!!"
He had a huge ND/online/geek fanbase which means he also had a huge trans fanbase, he enjoyed talking to trans fans and back in the day when it all seemed a lot more innocent was entirely supportive of identities and pronouns. I'm pretty sure although he didn't write Cherry as trans initially, when he saw she resonated with that group and realising how she could be read that way, he didn't explicitly trans her but leant into it to allow that reading as well. And I don't fault him for that. It was a different time.
But I think his finely tuned sense of justice, his gentle love of the ridiculousness and wonderfulness of people in how we can be at the same time both totally stereotypical of our group and also a unique individual worth seeing and loving, and his anger at the overreach of power when it treats those people like things would have eventually forced him despite himself to puncture the GI bubble.
(This bit was in the paragraph above but it got too long and had to come out. So it's a bit of an aside. But what I see in STP's books is joy in the very banality of everyday lives because looked at closely it's all still humans doing the best they can and the love and care and value in those lives is not less just because it happens all the time. So I cannot see that he would have fallen into the trap of only seeing the stories of some types of people as important.)
It's such a shame he wasn't here because I think the captured geek troops of TRAs might not have ended up quite as Red Guard if his voice was still around.
Which leads to - I'll not say my favourite STP book because how can you ever have just one, but certainly the one I come back to again and again for what it says about people and power, especially in the Gender Wars - Small Gods.
Vorbis is one of the most terrifying characters I know. And even before this thread took a Prachett turn, my first thought on reading that Dr Upton (now in my headcanon forevermore Dr Update) had amended his "contempraneous" notes, a was this exchange from Small Gods:
Vorbis: "That which appears to our senses is not the fundamental truth. Things that are seen and heard and done by the flesh are mere shadows of a deeper reality. This is what you must understand as you progress in the Church.’
‘But at the moment, lord, I know only the trivial truth, the truth available on the outside,’ said Brutha. He felt as though he was at the edge of a pit.
‘That is how we all begin,’ said Vorbis kindly.
‘So did the Ephebians kill Brother Murduck?’ Brutha persisted. Now he was inching out over the darkness.
‘I am telling you that in the deepest sense of the truth they did. By their failure to embrace his words, by their intransigence, they surely killed him.’
‘But in the trivial sense of the truth,’ said Brutha, picking every word with the care an inquisitor might give to his patient in the depths of the Citadel, ‘in the trivial sense, Brother Murduck died, did he not, in Omnia, because he had not died in Ephebe, had been merely mocked, but it was feared that others in the Church might not understand the, the deeper truth, and thus it was put about that the Ephebians had killed him in, in the trivial sense, thus giving you, and those who saw the truth of the evil of Ephebe, due cause to launch a – a just retaliation.’
They walked past a fountain. The deacon’s steel-shod staff clicked in the night.
‘I see a great future for you in the Church,’ said Vorbis, eventually.
In Dr Update's mind I suspect he believed he was justified in lying because it made clear a "truth" about SP which otherwise might be missed.
Which the brings me on to Dr Update's angels, who swept to his side to defend and protect him (anyone remember that awful dance performance with the beatific trans figure protected by a troop of self sacrificing pawns?).
I've been thinking for a while that these angry TRAs and allies, the ones who are so clearly gleeful at finding a TERF "in the wild" to unmask, denouce and cast out (I'm sure many women on here have made a gently GC or even just gender sceptical comment in self-defined progressive society and know exactly what I'm describing) see themselves as this era's equivalent to people like Miep Gies and Oscar Schindler - people who risked their own safety to save victims of the Nazi's hatred.
It never occurs to them that those heroes were never part of a baying mob - in fact they worked in deathly secrecy exactly because the mob was on the other side. As we note so often here, the TRAs seems to inhabit an alternative reality where they are standing up for the powerless and voiceless against the might of the establishment, totally oblivious to the irony that with the weight of the police, the educational establishment, the national broadcaster, most of the media outlets, the largest social media sites, the media regulator, the medical and legal political wings and the cultural and entertainment establishment, they are the establishment, and that far from making a brave stand against injustice, they are taking absolutely no risk in their "activism", and are in reality using the weight of the establishment to force their own agenda.